Re: Announce: zerotools (tools to keep virtual machine disks cleaner)

[Eduard Bloch <edi@gmx.de>]

#include <hallo.h>
* Aleksandr Koltsoff [Wed, Jan 03 2007, 05:47:36AM]:
> Hello
> 
> It was suggested that I'd post a short announcement on these two lists
> in order to get some feedback for a small set of utilities I just
> released. The documentation covers integrating the tools into Debian and
> I'd appreciate feedback on that part. Especially if I'm doing something
> which is out of line established Debian policies (hence the debian-devel
> list) [these parts are mainly listings 7 - 9 with the associated text].
> 
> I'll copy & paste the introduction text so that you may decide whether
> the program might be of interest to you. Target users for the tools are
> people who run Linux systems in a virtualized environment.
> 
> "Introduction
> 
> Zerotools are a set of tools to aid keeping virtual disks clean (by
> filling binary zero to those regions which are no longer in "use"). This

Please add a technical overview to your introduction. As a techie, I
would like to read what is so special about zerotools what I cannot do
with:
rm crapfiles && cat /dev/zero > bigfile && sync && rm bigfile && sync.

And you introduction does not tell me about anything new in your tools
and I do not like reading a long novel to learn that simple details.

Something like:

Introduction

Zerotools are a set of tools to aid keeping virtual disks clean (by
filling binary zero to those regions which are no longer in use as
visible files). In technical terms, they contain a library wrapper used
with LD_PRELOAD to make unlink calls zero-out the data before unlinking
the files and helper executables based on it.
...

Eduard.